460646 - [de] grammar faults in reply header

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Mozilla Localizations :: de / German, defect)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.1b1pre) Gecko/20081006 Shredder/3.0a3

TB3a3

Typos:
Tooltip for "one message back..."
wrong: "Eine Nachricht zurück in der *Chonik* der angesehenen Nachrichten"
right: "Eine Nachricht zurück in der Chronik der angesehenen Nachrichten"
wrong: "Eine Nachricht vorwärts in der *Chonik* der angesehenen Nachrichten"
right: "Eine Nachricht vorwärts in der Chronik der angesehenen Nachrichten"

Grammar:
When replying to an email, default caption says "On [date], [Sender] wrote:"
This structure is grammatically wrong in German.
wrong: "Am 19.10.2008 13:05*, [Sender] schrieb:*"
right: "Am 19.10.2008 13:05 schrieb [Sender]:" (no comma, different word order)
also right: "[Sender] schrieb am 19.10.2008 13:05:"


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

> Typos:
> Tooltip for "one message back..."
> wrong: "Eine Nachricht zurück in der *Chonik* der angesehenen Nachrichten"
> right: "Eine Nachricht zurück in der Chronik der angesehenen Nachrichten"
> wrong: "Eine Nachricht vorwärts in der *Chonik* der angesehenen Nachrichten"
> right: "Eine Nachricht vorwärts in der Chronik der angesehenen Nachrichten"

Fixed

> Grammar:
> When replying to an email, default caption says "On [date], [Sender] wrote:"
> This structure is grammatically wrong in German.
> wrong: "Am 19.10.2008 13:05*, [Sender] schrieb:*"
> right: "Am 19.10.2008 13:05 schrieb [Sender]:" (no comma, different word order)
> also right: "[Sender] schrieb am 19.10.2008 13:05:"

We don't have the flexibility in l10n to completely fix this. The comma is given by XUL-Code instead of an entity in *.dtd / *.properties files.

So fixed like this:
"Am 19.10.2008 13:05, schrieb [Sender]:"

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

> So fixed like this
> "Am 19.10.2008 13:05, schrieb [Sender]:"

Hmm, das klingt jetzt aber fast noch schlimmer als vorher, oder?
Ich mein, bei der aus dem Englischen übernommenen Variante wußte man wenigstens, es kommt aus dem Englischen, und wenn man nicht aufpasst, könnte man es ja fast schon für richtig halten - aber der letzte Fix wird sicher niemals richtig sein, da er sowohl gegen die englische als auch gegen die deutsche Grammatik verstößt!

Hmm, I think the implemented fix now sounds even worse than the original bad translation, where at least everyone could feel that word order has been taken over from the English version. In fact, I had to doublecheck as English is so frequent these days that you are tempted to feel that english word order in German is correct even though it is not. But the implemented fix sounds very wrong for *both* languages. Just my 2 cents. Doing comma's in XUL regardless of the target language is definitely not a good idea.

Comment 3

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

Ein klassischer Fall, um einen Bug anzulegen, der die Übersetzbarkeit bemängelt - nicht einen Fehler in der Übersetzung.

Die beiden Entities dazu sind:
mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote=schrieb %s
mailnews.reply_header_ondate=Am %s

Die Reihenfolge ist aufgrund der jeweiligen Variablen leider festgelegt - man kann also auch nicht den Autor nach vorne ziehen.

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

As Alex pointed out in comment #3, it's a problem of technical options for translations rather than an in issue of translating. This particular problem has been known since 2002:
Bug 160346 - Most reply_header options are not localizeable
Related Bug 140882, initial report, might help to solve this problem, as it mentions some other variables:

user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_ondate", "Am %s");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_separator", ", ");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote", "%s schrieb");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_colon", ":");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_type", 2);

Provided these variables do still exist, the following properties should be set in the German default settings to fix the problem of bad German in reply_header:

user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_ondate", "Am %s");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_separator", " "); //no comma needed in German
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote", "schrieb %s"); //in this order
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_colon", ":");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_type", 2);

This would then create the following reply header (almost as it should be, in proper German):

"Am 20.10.2008 16:16 schrieb Peter:" (still odd due to the time in between, but grammatically better)

Only if the above does NOT work and we are forced to have the comma as separator, I suggest changing mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote back to "%s schrieb", resulting in "Am 20.10.2008, Peter schrieb" (much better than "schrieb Peter" if there is a comma before it, see Robert Kaiser in bug 160346, comment #9, where he doesn't even notice the oddness of the single comma in "Am 28.04.2002 17:29, Robert Kaiser schrieb"). 

Generally speaking, to make translators' life easier, I agree with bug 160346, comment # 9:

> but you shouldn't have to use that. A only half-way localized string
> surely isn't the way to go here...

Full German localization should look like this:
"Am 28.04.2002 um 17:29 Uhr schrieb Robert Kaiser:"
This can't be done with the above variables.

So at the end of the day, reply header should be made fully customizable in any language, and have an UI for customization as well, as is requested by some other bug.

Comment 5

[Robert Kaiser]

Erm, what about the setting without time that only displays "% wrote:" in English? Does that use the same entities? If so, we probably f***ed either way, as just "schrieb Peter:" is pretty awful :(

Comment 6

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

IMHO Thunderbird developers don't want to have a GUI for the reply header. So we should create a new Bug requesting the missing entities in composeMsgs.properties. Maybe KaiRo could do this ;-) ?

Comment 8

[Sebastian Hengst [:aryx] (needinfo me if it's about an intermittent or backout)]

This got fixed, current default reply style is "Am TT.MM.JJJJ um HH:MM schrieb Vorname Nachname:"